Literature

We all have one—that memory of something done or said with the absolute confidence of youth that makes our toes curl to recall. We think about it years later, in bed at night or on long drives or errantly in the shower and wish, cheeks somehow still flaming, that there was some way to take

Hope Is a Wrecking Ball Ode to a Machine The jukebox or the bevel grinder. A wheelbarrow.Things that do their jobs when pressed.A dishwasher, of course, is a comfort.Not like a weedwhacker, or a tire iron,the way a wheel chock can keep a secret.This morning as I razed the onion grass,I remembered how my father

Except for a brief period, a few years ago. My wheels had finally found the ruts of a writer’s path: I had a viral essay and New York Times bylines. I had kneeled before Poets & Writers with a writing book and been tapped by their sword on my shoulder, included on their Best Books

Nature as tangled forest, as oil-drenched bayou or salt desert. Nature as flux and change. In all the books discussed here, the writers use ideas of nature as backdrops for perplexing and life-changing character dilemmas. The ideas of nature are different in every case, and the protagonists are all searching for something they don’t quite

Growing up in the countryside is not a romantic idea to me: it was simply where we lived. But the sense of being connected to a particular place, to feel that I have a home village, a place where my ancestors are buried and where I go to remember them, is probably no longer a

The Unavoidable Intimacy of Interpretation Ledia Xhoga Share article Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga I was fifteen minutes late and his phone number was out of service. Even in late January, Washington Square Park pulsed with the energy of summer. The chess players were fretting over their moves to the sound of Gershwin. The saxophonist’s Great

Esmeralda Santiago’s book When I Was Puerto Rican debuted 30 years ago. This memoir introduced us to Negi (Santiago), a pre-teen with a captivating voice who chronicles her life in rural Puerto Rico in the 1950s. In Santiago’s own words, the memoir captures a world that no longer exists in Puerto Rico. We watch Negi

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die, the debut memoir by Arianna Rebolini, which will be published by Harper on April 29, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here. After a decade of therapy and a stint in a psychiatric ward to treat suicidal depression, Arianna

In her memoir, Mettlework: A Mining Daughter on Home, Jessica E. Johnson writes “a story that has room for men who get things done” and “women who make-do and ask for little.” It’s a story about growing up in various mining camps, interwoven with her transition to parenthood in post-recession Portland, Oregon. But at its

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Pain fractures.  It fractures bodies into camps of health and malfunction. It fractures time into I probably can and I simply cannot. It fractures trust in the medical system. It fractures relationships, careers, bank accounts, hope.  In writing The Body Alone, form and content needed to reflect what I have experienced as the cyclical quest

Comics are unfettered by the respectable rules of the realist narrative. Dreams can bleed into waking life, metaphors can become literal, and contradictory sensory impressions can be juxtaposed without connective exposition. This is also how traumatic memories often present themselves. Graphic storytelling are an especially effective medium for depicting how abuse feels—how it alters your

Digging Out Bells: A Summer by Afton Montgomery A day of summer My right foot is a right foot in the garden in a black Croc no socks in a great deal of pain.  A day of summer Neuropathy, the confusion of nerves, comes in a slew of colors. Indigo. Lemon. A cold lavender and

The more I learn about memory, the less I trust my own. Neuroscientists tell us that the process of remembering does not mean that we are retrieving fixed images or scenes from a sealed vault in the brain, but rather that we are firing synapses along specific pathways, leading us back to a moment from

I’ve Been Diagnosed With Blackness Descent I might have seen you for help from my affliction with Blackness. I don’t know. Kendrick says he has been diagnosed with real nigga conditions. I needed you to make mine go away. I wanted you to will the earth to swallow the cop at my door. My relationship

What makes a beguiling bad guy? Or, heaven forbid, an enchantingly conniving woman? In recent fiction, who are the villains we love to hate or hate to love? What characteristics are we attracted to? Complexity? Seductiveness? Brilliance? Sheer cruelty? Who can stand up to the Shakespearean Iago or Dickens’s Uriah Heep?  What I’ve found in

Since its birth, Frankenstein has never lost its allure in adaptive possibilities. The novel was first adapted to the stage by Richard Brinsley Peake in 1823, just five years after the first edition of the novel was published in 1818. It’s widely known that Shelley herself attended a performance and was bemused by how he

Between 1976 and 1983, tens of thousands of people “disappeared” in Argentina. Their absences were designed to create a state of terror that few were strong enough to defy. But who were “the disappeared” and what did they endure?  The majority of the “disappeared” were in their twenties and early thirties, captured and often subject